As noted by Sean Alexander, Director of Silverlight, on his blog, Microsoft.com (US) has become one of the first high-traffic websites jumping on the Silverlight bandwagon. The new page published just a few hours ago features a Silverlight-powered video showcase for the XBOX 360 Elite. Here is a video capture of the webpage in case you don’t have Silverlight or missed it over the weekend.

The video which it plays is a 1.5MB WMV video file streaming from the Microsoft.com servers. By looking through the XAML file, you’d find a link to the WMV file it references, which upon analysis contains a video encoded at 878Kbps with the WMV9/VC-1 codec as well as audio encoded at 128Kbps encoded with the Windows Media Audio 9.2.

Even though this is not a technical feat by any means, the same video could have been delivered in Flash, however it might help the adoption of the Silverlight runtime by exposing it to the largest number of users possible.

@RC: i second that thought. it’s too new for people to be using it. and if it breaks something in the wild, then the team would know and be able to implement a fix for it. the beta needs more publicity if they’re going to lick compatibility issues.